How the stars work
Most "best of" lists favour big channels, because they rank by views. We don't. A video from a channel with 5,000 subscribers can earn five stars as easily as one from a channel with 5 million.
Three things, two points each
| What we measure | 1 point | 2 points |
|---|---|---|
| Reach for its size: views compared with the channel's subscribers | half as many views as subscribers | twice as many |
| Liked: likes compared with views | 1% or more | 2.5% or more |
| Talked about: comments per 1,000 views | 0.5 or more | 1.5 or more |
That gives up to 6 points, which become 1 to 5 stars. Only videos with 2 stars or more are listed.
Videos from other sites
Some videos come from the Internet Archive, the National Film Board of Canada and Vimeo. Those sites don't publish the same numbers as YouTube, so each of their videos is compared with other videos from the same site: the top tenth by plays earns 5 stars, the next fifth 4 stars, the next two-fifths 3 stars, and the rest 2 stars. The National Film Board publishes no play counts, so its films start at 3 stars. Every shelf is then sorted by stars, whatever site a video comes from.
Brand-new videos
A video less than 30 days old hasn't had time to reach its audience, so for new videos we also try scoring on likes and comments alone (weighted up to make a fair comparison) and use whichever is better.
Our stars and viewer reviews are different things
Our stars come only from public numbers and are worked out the same way for every video. Nobody's opinion goes into them, including ours. Tap the stars on any video to see what viewers think: their own ratings and comments are shown separately, and they never change our stars.
What stars don't mean
Stars measure how an audience responded, using public numbers. They aren't a review, and they don't tell you whether a video is accurate. We also leave some things out entirely, whatever their numbers: fiction presented as history, anonymous movie uploads, and Shorts.